WASHINGTON: Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton (R-Arlington/Ennis) and 16 House Republicans introduced a bill to fix flaws in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act that are driving millions of small businesses toward bankruptcy.

“The original bill is devastating small businesses so yesterday Congressman George Radanovich and I introduced a bill that gives the Consumer Product Safety Commission the flexibility to grant some exceptions for small businesses and things like children’s books,” Barton said. “It doesn’t change the lead standard. It doesn’t change the phthalate standard. We’re not stepping away from children’s safety and we’re not trying to gut the act. It just gives the flexibility to the commission in certain cases to clarify the definitions.”
 
Since CPSIA became law, the CPSC has postponed enforcement of the law’s testing and certification standards but the requirement to meet the lead standard remains in full force. That leaves everyone from libraries to mom-and-pop home businesses on the hook, since the only way to know that their products meet the standard is to test them. 

“During these difficult economic times, the government should be looking for ways to encourage businesses, not shut them down,” said Radanovich, R-Calif., ranking member of the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee. “This common sense legislation helps small- and medium-sized businesses keep their doors open in the face of oppressive unintended consequences found within the children’s toy bill.”

Dozens of opponents of the bill flew to the Nation's Capitol and held a rally to express their feelings to lawmakers. When Congressman Barton announced the new legislation to small business owners they cheered. Watch the video here.

The legislation:

• Makes lead and phthalate provisions prospective – only products made after a date certain must be manufactured to standards. Permits retailers to “sell-through” inventory for one year after the manufacturing standards go into effect.
  
• Creates a temporary compliance scheme for lead content testing which permits manufacturers to use any reasonable testing methodology and mandates CPSC promulgate lead content testing procedures in six months.
  
• Creates regulatory flexibility in exemption authority and inserts age consideration in exemption standard.
  
• Creates broader exemption authority with higher standard for those products that cannot meet the “regular” lead exemption standard when an exemption would better preserve child and public safety (e.g., children are less likely to suffer lead exposure from youth motocross, snowmobiles, and wheel-wheel ATVs than they are to suffer serious harm from using the same vehicles made for adults).
  
• Permits component part testing.
  
• Creates regulatory flexibility in the labeling provisions.

The bill does not reverse any of the agreements made in the last Congress. Rather, it builds in a little more time for compliance and a little more flexibility; flexibility that is urgently needed to untie the hands of the commission to respond to the concerns of many small businesses and other industries. 

For a copy of the legislation, click here.